


i heard the blackbird sing

by MathildaHilda



Series: What If; Red Dead Redemption Edition [6]
Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Arthur is a good uncle, Arthur's honor is all over the place, Canonical Character Death, Chapter 6: Beaver Hollow (Red Dead Redemption 2), I took a hammer to Canon and ruined it even more with my awful ideas, Mission: "Visting Hours", Morally Ambiguous Character, Non-Canonical Character Death, Not A Fix-It, TB Sucks with a capital S, can be read as Arthur/Abigail if you want to but I won't tag it as such
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-18 12:12:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19334299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: The sketch is John and the mare, under a sapling in a clearing, the one rested against the other, with the mare’s head rested across his wiry shoulder and down in his lap. The sun isn’t too high, barely visible through the sapling’s young branches, and Arthur thinks – now, so many years later – that that is perhaps the most peaceful he’d seen John in a very long while.





	i heard the blackbird sing

The words that leave the dying guard’s paling lips, hits Arthur like a punch in the gut.

Sadie’s arm wavers for a moment, eyes hard shards of disbelief.

“Liar.” She bites, teeth bared from between shivering lips. The man takes a ragged breath against the blood pooling in his throat, choking on it as he stares the untamed fury of Sadie Adler in the face.

“I ain’t.” He chokes back, lips now coated in a veil of red.

There’s a rush of ice water down Arthur’s spine when he, finally, _knows_ that the man ain’t lying.

He had entertained the idea a fair few times, of dying men lying before their end, but only the bastards who ain’t right in the head, would lie about a thing like that.

But still, the truth won’t make Arthur talk. Won’t let him react past the lump freezing his insides, and numbing him from the inside out.

 

Sadie bites her resolution down, pulls her lips together into a tight line, and pulls the trigger. The shot echoes between the buildings, and the red seeps into the dry ground, watering it with quicker efficiency than any rainstorm ever could.

A short guard steps up and aims a gun at Sadie’s head, stuttering as he goes and looking all too eager to pull the trigger himself. The man would’ve worked as good as any shield, but Arthur is far from in a gracious mood.

Had they thought it out properly, perhaps they would’ve left the man alive enough to be able to slip away much safer, but, in that moment, he doesn’t blame anyone for pulling their triggers.

He doesn’t blame himself from grinding his teeth, press the muzzle snuggly against the man’s head, and pull the trigger. He barely flinches once the blood splatters.

He makes very little movement, once the body drops.

The world is a haze of dimmed green, glowing gold from a setting sun, and the red haze that all too often seems to follow Arthur Morgan’s anger like a well-trained dog, just close enough to exist out of reach.

 

( _“He hung. Two days ago.”_

Arthur knows the moment the words leave the guard’s mouth. He _knows_ , Goddammit.

Goddamn it all to Hell.

Arthur wishes it’d been his gun. His bullet that shot through the man’s skull and watered the ground a blackened red. He wishes, but no Morgan has ever gotten what they’d wanted in life.

They’d all died stupid, and reckless, and alone.

Arthur knew, and John knew too, that eventually, the Marston luck was to run out.

He’d just never expected for it to run out so soon.)

 

 

He doesn’t blame Sadie for pulling the trigger.

A part of him simply wishes that they hadn’t had to do it at all.

 

~

 

He’d survived Guarma with the knowledge that Marston might be either dead or would be by the time they got back.

He’d survived Guarma with the knowledge that his brother was behind bars, and that he was the luckiest son of a bitch Arthur’d ever met, and would find that surefire way to cheat Death of its one and only prize, yet again.

(But, eventually, that luck runs out.)

 

 

 

Sadie sits down, once they reach the other side again, rifle loose in her bruised hands, and eyes equal pools of blackened charcoal, and stares at the worn wood beneath their feet.

“Shit.”

Arthur would’ve laughed then, hadn’t it been for the vice squeezed around his heart.

 

~

 

Not too long after Blackwater, but late enough so that Marston was still healing from his encounter with the wolves, John had been drunk and wondered aloud the serious questions, with a not equally drunk Hosea.

He’d asked Hosea the question of loyalty.

If he were to think back, Arthur weren’t quite sure where exactly Hosea had stood on the spectrum of loyalty to the promises that had thinned out with age.

If he were to think back on it, it almost seemed like they’d all been loyal to the ghosts of those promises, for a very long time.

And, eventually, even the ghosts allow themselves to move on.

 

(Once, Arthur Morgan had been loyal.

Now, when both Hosea and Marston are gone, he ain’t too sure of just exactly _what_ he had been loyal to, to begin with.)

 

John had asked Hosea the question of what loyalty meant to him.

Hosea had only answered, drunk and hiccoughing, that loyalty was a matter of opinion in the matters at hand.

It hadn’t been John’s desired answer, the annoyed huff in his breath indicating the disappointment for anyone close enough to hear, but Arthur heard very little about it past that one question between the two people, whose loss he now felt the most.

Marston had asked Hosea. Arthur had never really asked anyone.

Loyalty, for all its purposes, is worth pretty damn little by the end.

 

~

 

Arthur pulls his horse to a halt once they reach the middle of the woods, the ride slow and agonizing both in heart and lung, and so damn, long.

They’re far enough away from camp, and they’re far away from Annesburg or Van _Goddamn_ Horn to not rouse too much suspicion from anyone who could have an opinion that mattered even a little.

They’re just two travelers, out on the trail in a forest haunted by crazy folk and foolish ghosts, both looking as if though the world had torn itself apart at the seams.

Arthur dismounts, hitches the horse simply by tossing the reins on the ground, and slides down the base of a gnarled tree.

He’s been tired for a while now.

This doesn’t feel much different.

And he couldn’t give a single, good Goddamn what anyone said or did in that one moment of tranquility he allows himself.

“Murfree’s could come.” Sadie says, unhooking her feet from the stirrups. Arthur scoffs. Sadie doesn’t look at him.

Arthur’s not too sure what she sees, but he sees that same little kid he’d seen fifteen years ago; eyes deep pits of terrified charcoal, wiry limbs too long for his thin body, and a hangman’s coarse rope around his even thinner throat.

He’s seen that kid for a while now, ever since they shot the rope. He’s simply masqueraded the kid with a man worth knowing, no matter how much of a fool he could be.

“I used to always ask myself; just how desperate was Dutch when he brought that no-good kid along? Can’t swim to save his life, fell of a horse more often than he stayed on it, and he never, not once, agreed to a single haircut in his damn life.” Arthur says, a finger in the air to make his point across.

Sadie swings her legs where they hang freely, hands in her sides. The horn on Bob’s saddle looks far more interesting than it probably oughta.

 

(He doesn’t tell her about the time Arthur held his arms locked to his body and let Miss Grimshaw loose with a pair of wool shears on the mess he called hair. It earned him a black eye, but it at least allowed the kid to walk into town without scaring half the folk.

The black eye was worth something, it seemed, at least.)

 

“Think we can get him back?” She asks, eventually, once the pattern in the horn has gotten dull to stare at, and the trees has started making peculiar sounds.

“How? We went in there, and brought a whole heap of law after us. All for nothin’.” The hat waves throughout the air, almost like a leaflet.

Or, a white flag of defeat.

“Yeah. All for nothin’. That’s why we’re goin’ right back in there.”

Arthur looks at her, eyes bloodshot from the war that’s already going on inside him, and bites his tongue.

He simply nods, because what else is there to do?

Ain’t no way in all the Hells that he’d leave Marston in a place such as that to rot for all the rats and the gators to feast on, once the graves fill up and the water takes what it’s owed.

They’re just two travelers, ghosts to the folk that sees them with their silent horses and pale shirts.

Just two people, out on the trail, to search for a dead man, and bring him home.

 

~

 

It’ll always be the two of them, until the TB takes its final win and the government takes its own victory, some odd years later when the dry air is all any of them know, and the hate and the lies have done their utmost to create a vacuum where something believable had once existed.

They do get him back, and it’s a simple enough plan when all the men who’d seen their faces are dead and buried on the mainland, dragged away by simpleminded guards who don’t quite seem to understand the purpose of a useless attack.

They get him back, not a word about anything but a dead van der Linde passed up the chain of command all the way to Mister Milton.

No one’s really looking for them. Arthur wouldn’t have been too sad if they did keep looking, and had perhaps stopped them on their travel, because there is hellfire in his veins and the red haze has a stubborn way of staying far beyond its initial welcome.

It’s simple enough, by stating that they’re from one organization or other, and are preparing for proper burials for them who don’t deserve it.

Sadie orders the guards around, her yellow dress a stark contrast next to the men’s dull, blue uniforms.

Arthur’s a simple driver, and he’s willing to thank God for that.

 

 

They drive the cart as far as they dare without arousing suspicion in the locals or the idiots hiding in the forest.

They drive the cart as far as they can, before Arthur is the one that pulls the reins, lowers his head, and collect the courage needed to face his brother one last time.

By then, John Marston’s been gone for four days.

By then, John Marston’s still dressed in hangman’s clothing.

By then, John Marston still wears the hangman’s collar.

 

~

 

Arthur Morgan’s lived most of his life with the ghosts in his head.

His father’s voice barks out the odd order, creates the odder thoughts, and births the strangest of outcomes, all for the price of sleepless nights and restless days.

 

(Lyle Morgan was a Morgan through and through; he died, reckless, and stupid.

He died by the hangman’s noose.

Had Arthur been allowed to wish, then he would’ve wished for John to be given a kinder end than an end which his own father suffered.)

 

Dutch, and, more often now, Hosea exists as two halves of a whole. Nothing he does, can be completed without the other, no matter what he has to say in the matter.

 

(Which is kinder; a bullet or the coarse end of a rope?)

 

Arthur Morgan lived most of his life with ghosts in his head, and he lived the last part of it, with the first and last image he was to ever have of his brother.

A hangman’s noose ain’t the prettiest of paintings God has ever, however mistakenly, created.

 

~

 

The ride into camp two days after they rode out of it, and Abigail is the first to greet them and the last to leave them.

Arthur only needs to meet Abigail’s eyes.

Her words, and her tears, speaks enough for the both of them.

Jack – young, darling Jack – has always looked at him as if though he hung the moon and the stars. The eyes aren’t much different now, but a part of Arthur hopes that the boy’s thoughts have changed for the worse, given the recent, as of yet untold, circumstances.

John Marston is not coming home, and so Arthur Morgan doesn’t deserve the empathy for trying to bring him back, and failing because the Pinkertons and the local law got trigger-happy.

 “’m sorry, kid.” He kneels, and whispers into his soaked neckerchief, still around his face, the metallic smell of blood filling his nose. The boy’s thin forearms are trapped in his own two hands.

 

(He’d worn the cloth when he’d dug the grave.

He suspects he’ll wear it when he digs his own.)

 

“Where’ve you been, Black Lung?” Micah snaps, voice loud and brash like a whip, shattering the air as if though it’d been glass.

“Buryin’ a friend.” He says. The little boy freezes under his hands, and presses himself against him, as if he were much younger than he’s tried to prove himself to be.

Arthur catches, through the corner of his eye, how Dutch’s head snaps up at his words. The knife, twisted between the fingers of Bill, freezes.

Javier drops the string he’s repairing for his guitar.

No one says it at first, until Micah speaks, but it ain’t exactly hard to know. To understand.

“Friend, huh? What kinda friend’ll that be then?”

“Marston.” He says, in a space that can barely be called a breath.

If silence had existed before he spoke up, Arthur doesn’t have a name for that which follows.

 

~

 

It’s Tilly that speaks first.

Brave, young Tilly, with far more brains than any man will ever have.

“What’re you sayin’?”

Abigail’s sobs have since gone quiet. Jack hasn’t made a sound.

“Guess you got what you wanted, Micah.” Arthur says then, the gleam in Micah’s eyes so unmistakably malicious.

“And, what did I want, Black Lung?”

“Ain’t no more rat in camp, no more.” He nods toward Miss Grimshaw, the woman’s hands idle, for once; weaponless, but no less deadly. “Molly’s dead. Now John’s, too.”

Dutch’s eyes are, for lack of better words, wild.

“Buried him. Up the mountains, to the West.”

Dutch looks as if though he wants to speak, his mouth opening and closing, but he decides to keep quiet. Decides to swallow his words that might’ve made little sense, and turns away.

He stops, however, when Arthur speaks again.

“They hung him, Dutch.”

Up until the day when most everyone has left, and Micah’s anger is a seething nest of vipers, Dutch doesn’t say a single, Goddamn word.

 

~

 

He’s drawn John a handful of times; the kid having tried to burn the first sketch he found. He’s only drawn him a handful, not because he tried to burn it, but because John had always been there.

Had always stared up at him, _looked_ up to him, and wanted answers or a cut or something no one but him seemed to understand.

He does have a few sketches though.

He still has the sketch from when John’s newest score, a gray mare the size of a bull, had dragged him out into the lake and then refused to return with him, effectively leaving them both stranded on a small patch of land.

The sketch is coal and smudged lines, but Arthur can just about remember how John waved his arms about and shouted for someone to come get him and the horse of the “island”.

But the sketch isn’t fully about that one event; the mare, named Callie according to the papers he stole with her, was a calm one. Trusting until you gave her reason not to.

The sketch is John and the mare, under a sapling in a clearing, the one rested against the other, with the mare’s head rested across his wiry shoulder and down in his lap. The sun isn’t too high, barely visible through the sapling’s young branches, and Arthur thinks – now, so many years later – that that is perhaps the most peaceful he’d seen John in a very long while.

Another sketch – the one John had tried to burn, seeing as it’s slightly singed around the edges – is drawn fully from memory.

John, all of fourteen, had had the guts to steal Arthur’s hat. And, had climbed a damn tree to get away.

The sketch is yet another one that doesn’t contain the full event; John and the tree, far away in sight, is crudely drawn in a corner, but the sketch of John, laughing and toothless after a fight with a man double the size, before Arthur got the hat back, takes up most of the page.

Arthur wishes, before Micah yet again opens his giant trap of a mouth, that that was how he would remember his brother.

As a kid; trapped in charcoal, the early blackbirds’ song, pale mares and chipped teeth.

It’s not, and never will be, but he is allowed to dream.

 

~

 

Micah wants to rob a train, Dutch nods consent, and Arthur gives enough money to Tilly, and Abigail, and Jack to get out.

“We’ll both find you. Me, ‘n Sadie. After this, when the whole thing’s done.” He mumbles before Dutch can make a brash, and quiet entrance in the scheme of surviving under the laws of civilized men.

Abigail is quiet where Jack is loud, so it’s Tilly that takes the money, and gives Old Boy’s reins to Abigail once they’ve all ridden out. Jack cries two days after his father was buried.

It takes Arthur twenty-two.

 

~

 

She doesn’t have a photograph of him, have nothing but the boy next to her, to remember him by.

She has just enough sweet memories, from when the man wanted to be sweet, to remember just how much she did love him.

She doesn’t know what happened in the bank, past what Charles told her after he came back and no one else did, and what Dutch mumbled, and Arthur interpreted.

She doesn’t know, yet she knows enough.

Enough, simply being that the man she married in all but name and in front of God, was dead upside a mountain, stolen from a prison to live an eternity under an open sky.

She doesn’t know what happened on the train, or what happened after, but she knows that the anger in Sadie’s eyes and the grief in Arthur’s are both the result of broken trust.

Miss Grimshaw comes later, deep in the night while Sadie’s on watch and Arthur and Jack teaches one another how to read in the flickering firelight.

Abigail bites back sobs, but Tilly doesn’t say a word.

Tilly Jackson stays for a year.

Miss Grimshaw stays for two.

Arthur buries the latter next to John, far up North where no law will ever come close.

 

~

 

Abigail learns how to read fully without a stutter, the year before Jack turns fifteen.

Arthur can do little to help, his throat burning with every cough and the smell of blood in his nose, but he does smile, and she does take his hand.

Arthur Morgan has learned never to hide his pride.

But, he as yet to learn how to let the important ones go.

 

~

 

Sadie comes for a visit in 1912, her smile a little dull, but her eyes lit like bonfires in the Mexican heat.

“It ain’t TB.” She says when he asks why she’s come to the little shack they call home.

She gives him a newspaper, wrinkled and torn, and he reads about Dutch, and Bill, and Javier.

He reads about Micah. Gunned down in his home North of Strawberry, his own protection courtesy of the American government.

“They pay their rats well.” He rasps, knowing full well what the smile on Sadie’s face means.

“Not well enough.”

He reads the paper again, later that night, and looks to Sadie.

He says goodbye to Abigail and Jack two days after, and Sadie shakes his hand.

There’s little use in running, when what’s been chasing you is already around the corner.

It’s only a matter of time.

 

~

 

He writes Abigail and Jack as often as he can, leaves unsent letters under the house’s loose floorboards, and waits for a year.

He’d rather wait than risk the journeys he dreams about.

He waits a year, and then Mister Milton pounds on the door.

“Took your damn time, didn’t you?” He says. Milton doesn’t seem to have a reply.

The scar Sadie left is even worse than he would’ve expected, so maybe he’s not too surprised that the man doesn’t reply.

Arthur wishes Sadie would’ve cut deeper.


End file.
